This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

Over the past several years, complexity in product development has increased significantly. A greater number of design alternatives need to be evaluated despite time and resource constraints. To aid with the complexity of various engineering processes, engineering simulation and analysis has become an integral part of the engineering approach to product design and development. Up-front design analysis and optimization have proven to be integral in being faster to market and reducing costs. In addition, engineering simulation and analysis has become a global process. A wide range of users with varying levels of expertise need access to sophisticated simulation techniques and a unified approach to engineering strategy.
In order to capture and deploy an organization’s best practices, loosely defined ad-hoc processes must be converted into standardized processes based on both internal design guidelines and external customer-driven requirements. Methods standardization is essential to produce consistency in results. To aid in methods standardization and increase confidence in simulation results, validation and verification of the standardized process flow is necessary by means of physical testing and correlation. After establishing and validating standard processes, they are converted to guided practices, and ultimately to fully automated processes. SPDM (Simulation Process Data Management) provides the framework for process automation and is the engineering tool used for process capture and management.
In this paper, standard and automated processes are presented to demonstrate how simulation has been integrated into the overall product development process. Examples of how virtual and physical test data are captured in a common platform are discussed in the context of validation and verification of standard processes and creating standardized input databases. Various analysis types and optimization examples are shown to illustrate different maturity levels of process automation and how a simulation-based design approach is becoming accessible across engineering disciplines at Dana Incorporated, thereby enabling simulation-driven design directions.